IBM Shifts Spark Development to its Cloud

IBM upped its investment in Apache Spark this week via a cloud-based development platform that would expand data science and developer access to various flavors of Spark, including a machine-learning version. IBM (NYSE: IBM) said Tuesday (June 7) it is expanding access to the data analytics development tools available on its Bluemix cloud platform, giving data scientists working in the R programming language faster access to more data along with new contributions to SparkR, SparkSQL and Apache SparkML. IBM, which last year announced a $300 million investment in the Spark real-time data analysis platform as an emerging “analytics operating system,” said it cloud-based development environment would speed data ingestion and analysis by combining resources from IBM and others on a managed Spark environment. “We see an opportunity to significantly transform…